There was a similar theme in Kim Stanley Robinson's book Red Mars - a lot of the initial crew of colonists actually wanted to preserve the planet in its pristine state.
I thought this was completely crazy. There are no ecosystems to protect, no endangered species, no green living things. Moving development from Earth into space should count as an overwhelming win for the environment.
For those that have jumped straight to the comments this isn’t the flavor of TFA:
> The moon hosts several sites of extraordinary scientific importance (SESIs) to astronomy.
> Only within the last 20 years have astronomers discovered locations on the moon where conditions are ideal for the study of the early universe. The far side of the moon, for example, is one of the most radio-silent places in our solar system, as radio transmissions and interference from Earth are blocked. From there, radio telescopes can peer into the universe’s past to a time before the stars formed—or search for evidence of technologically advanced alien life, writes the Guardian.
> But because of the far side’s mountainous terrain, scientists say the installation of telescopes is possible at only three sites—and one in particular is rich in helium-3, which space mining companies have identified as a key element in quantum computers and fusion energy.
> Another scarce resource are the moon’s “cold traps,” located along craters near the north and south poles, where sunlight hasn’t been able to reach for billions of years. Among the universe’s most frigid places, they are the perfect location for infrared telescopes, which are specifically designed to operate at extremely cold temperatures. These could potentially collect images of Earth-sized exoplanets, and seismometers placed at cold traps could measure the moon’s own movement amidst gravitational waves.
> > But because of the far side’s mountainous terrain, scientists say the installation of telescopes is possible at only three sites—and one in particular is rich in helium-3, which space mining companies have identified as a key element in quantum computers and fusion energy.
A while ago, I saw a page that did the maths, and it worked out that the abundance of He3 was so low (at best 50 parts per billion), that even if we assumed a perfect fusion reactor (which we don't have) and noted the energy density of fusion fuel, it made slightly more sense to separate the metal and oxygen in the lunar regolith, catapult the resulting metal ingots to earth, and then generate energy from magnetically decelerating them (and even more if the ingots were shaped into liquid oxygen tanks). Likewise, one could get more energy from burning that metal as if it were coal than from fusion of the He3 in the same volume of regolith, because the particle density of He3 is so low.
I have not been able to find a link to that page since reading it, so unless someone here can remember where it is, I may have to re-do the maths and blog about it myself.
I always find that the reality of space exploration is so much more disappointing than my 1970s science fiction. When I was a kid I dreamed of farming on Ganymede and mining on Mars. The technology of today is AMAZING, but space is looking more and more barren.
Well, we have put hundreds of billions of person-years into developing technology suited to Earth. If we find a reason to put in the investment into these other environments, those sci-fi dreams may still come true!
Wow! TIL. At first I thought you must be reading the map wrong, but you're right. Landing on Deimos does indeed seem to require less delta-V than landing on our own moon, assuming that this map is correct. And that seems to hold even without aerobraking.
14917 ms-1 [Moon] v. 14520 ms-1 [Deimos], if I'm reading it right.
Some might see that as a benefit! But yeah you'd want a satellite orbiting in the L4/L5 Lagrange point of the Earth/Sun system. It would seem stationary to both Earth and Counter-Earth/L3.
I'm 90% sure you're mixing up two other things, about planets in the goldilocks zone of red dwarfs being tidally locked to their host star?
Mercury definitely isn't tidally locked to the sun, and its sidereal day isn't a whole integer fraction of Earth's year.
I'm not 100% certain without doing some algebra, but don't think it's even possible for one planet to be tidally locked to any planet in a different orbit, be that Mercury to Earth or otherwise, owing to the distance not being constant while angular momentum has to be.
(If two planets share an orbit, there are an infinite number of trivial solutions).
Maybe a telescope has to rise above the harsh and damaging lunar dust. After construction of anything on the moon, I'm concerned about the 20 micron, glass-like, dust. Lunar dust is not weathered, like Earth dust. Once you are out of the lunar "atmosphere", the dust remains in low orbit for a long time.
Just put the telescope in space. It's a lot easier, despite the difficulty.
The issue might be landing anywhere near it to construct the telescope. We are probably pretty far away from landing on the near side of the moon and then building roads or train tracks to the far side and creating a flat area.
> “We need to preserve the far side for exciting science that includes measuring magnetic fields associated with potentially habitable exoplanets and uncovering the mysteries of the unexplored Dark Ages of the early universe—using low radio frequency observations”
Does that sound completely crazy? Like... the fact that they want to study it before private companies destroy it for their own benefit?
> Moving development from Earth into space should count as an overwhelming win for the environment.
I don't think this is obvious at all. Actually I don't believe it at all. First because enabling development in space will not at all make us reduce it on Earth. Why would it? If we can make money in space and on Earth, it's more money than just on Earth. It's even completely possible that having development in space will make it even worse for the environment on Earth.
Once the market believes that gold or other precious metals will imminently be returned from space, the price will plummet, making many destructive mining operations unprofitable.
As a tangent, have you seen that gold rush show on discovery? Taking acres of lush and beautiful Klondike Forest and bulldoze it barren so they can maybe get a few oz of gold. It's terrible.
It's a balance. You could also say, why should humanity be kept away from something just so a few astronomers can have an easier time measuring something? Like demanding all city lights be turned off to allow easier observations.
National parks require a nation, who owns parts of the Moon? Why would they be interested on making "parks" on their part of the land? Think of it more like Antarctica, which actually makes things fine I guess, since Antarctica is basically a big scientific lab, with almost no industrial development
I like seeing these attempts because it draws out that the motivating factor often is (as you say) not protection of any nature/environment nor the human experience thereof. It's just a gut instinct a lot of people have to change and development.
I don't think that's it. A lot of people find nature-—including barren landscapes--beautiful, and find immersion in it to be psychologically rejuvenating. Protection of ecosystems and other living things is, of course, important. But that's not the only reason to protect at least parts of the natural world from human development.
I don't claim that that these considerations should always (or even often) be decisive. But there is more going on than just resistance to change. Development of a pristine natural space destroys something of value, even when that space is barren. But, of course, it may create something of greater value.
Another dimension may be the sense that the human touch feels, in some sense, irreversible. So one might think we should be conservative when disturbing an environment that has been formed only by natural processes over millions of years. Once humans start digging and building there, we can't truly restore it to its former state. Maybe this is closer to mere resistance to change. But I think it's worth taking more seriously whether there is more to it than that. It's a much harder argument, though, when it's an environment that no living thing will ever really experience otherwise.
Edit: I (and, I think, many others) believe that we would enjoy the experience of gazing out onto a martian or lunar landscape, generalizing from our experiences with environments on earth. But I suppose it's interesting to contemplate the possibility that we're wrong. I guess I can't rule out the possibility that some aspect of the experience on the moon or Mars could prevent it from scratching the same itch as, for example, a desert on earth.
Edit 2: I recognize that these musings have basically nothing to do with TFA, which discusses scientists' concern over the potential destruction of sites with significant scientific value. They're certainly not just talking about the pretty views.
> find immersion in it to be psychologically rejuvenating
As a justification for the rules people like, I don’t think that’s at all compatible with the frequency with which people actually partake in this, or their lack of concern with focusing on preserving the most valuable landscapes.
> Another dimension may be the sense that the human touch feels, in some sense, irreversible. So one might think we should be conservative when disturbing an environment that has been formed only by natural processes over millions of years
I think this is not meaningfully different than what I said originally: resistance to change, period. It could be different if people had any sort of quantitative model for what sort of preservation our descendants would value, and how to trade that off against our current needs. But in practice no one does this, so it just becomes “don’t change anything”.
> a lot of the initial crew of colonists actually wanted to preserve the planet in its pristine state
A key theme in the trilogy was the independence (or not) of Mars from Earth. This really kicks in when the Arkady character argues that as the actual inhabitants of Mars, the colonists themselves should decide how they make their future rather than Mission Control on Earth. Kim Stanley Robinson then explores this tension from several viewpoints (including terraforming, as you say) that are held by his major characters. This also defuses the possible criticism of the plot that such an expensive mission would have been conducted while leaving the massive issue of terraforming unresolved.
> I thought this was completely crazy.
So did a lot of the characters, especially the ones who go about the terraforming anyway.
The Reds were defending the actual existing microorganisms on Mars, that were guaranteed to lose out to lifeforms engineered to terraform the planet. It's a harsh position to hold when weighed against human life, but there's something there.
The cost to bring trash (or even nuclear waste) to the moon is completely prohibitive, so the only thing it will be a dumping ground for is trash generated on the moon. And for the foreseeable future it will be entirely appropriate to dump lunar trash where ever it is most convenient.
>dumping ground for is trash generated on the moon.
That might be a easier problem to solve on the moon. Considering its much much lower escape velocity. Once someone builds something like a mass-driver on the moon - they can just shoot the junk into an orbit that will eventually have it fall into the sun in a few hundred years.
With the possible exception of something extremely expensive to store like nuclear waste, we do not want to eject trash. It contains many valuable elements, and we have plenty of storage space. Much better to pile it up, as we are doing on Earth, and then mine it later once we have better tech.
Most of the long term scientific value of the moon sits below the regolith, down to the layers that formed from the collision with earth. There are magnetic features below the surface of the moon that we are very interested in called 'lunar swirls'. We think they are old iron rich magma pipes that have solidified and become magnetic. IM-3 launches in 2025, and has a lander with the Lunar Vertex rover, hopefully this one wont fall over. Its job is to investigate one of these swirls.
I can highly recommend "A City on Mars"[^0], which I recently read.
The authors go into fascinating detail about what it takes to build planetary settlements, and they not only focus on the engineering questions but make a point to talk about the legal aspects of space settlement as well.
And the mining companies are better because they wouldn't be telling people what to do, they would just destroy any possibility of doing what the scientists want to do?
The moon is well outside anything one might define as anyone's jurisdiction, nobody has any rights or responsibilities there and disputes are resolved with who gets there first and has a big enough stick to keep others away. That's the reality.
Nations can, and do, punish people for crimes they commit elsewhere on the planet. Nobody can get away with staking land out on the moon and declaring sovereignty, because it's impossible to exist on the moon without a massive support apparatus on earth enabling it. It's easy enough to throw those people in a cell.
And either nations take care of the offenders and form treaties, or it leads to war at the worst.
>While I understand their concerns, it seems a bit crazy to think you have any right to tell people what to do or not do on the moon.
Have you stopped to think what happens to the earth if the moon were just outright gone? Because that's ultimately what the debate is about. If anything valuable is found there, you can be assured someone will strip mine it until every last piece of value is removed, and the non-valuable thing is left to float off into the universe, not their problem.
I think it's EVERYONE'S right to tell anyone trying to profit off of what is at the moon what they can and can't do.
- the Moon is extremely large; if you mined the entire Moon and covered the Earth's surface with the material, including oceans, it would form a layer about thirty miles thick
- most of the Moon is made up of the same stuff as the Earth's crust (silica, alumina, etc) and has very little value, compared to the energy needed to get it off the Moon
- if humans remove material from the Moon, the rest of it doesn't "float off into the universe", it just stays in orbit unless it is actively pushed, which would take an insane amount of energy, something like the entire world's electricity consumption for a billion years
>- the Moon is extremely large; if you mined the entire Moon and covered the Earth's surface with the material, including oceans, it would form a layer about thirty miles thick
I'm aware of how large the moon is.
>- most of the Moon is made up of the same stuff as the Earth's crust (silica, alumina, etc) and has very little value, compared to the energy needed to get it off the Moon
CURRENTLY has very little value. Just like CURRENTLY there's very little value to water in most of the world. In 500 years, without some fairly significant changes to the way we're treating the earth, that will be a VERY different story.
>- if humans remove material from the Moon, the rest of it doesn't "float off into the universe", it just stays in orbit unless it is actively pushed, which would take an insane amount of energy
That's the point... what exactly do you think is going to happen to earth in that scenario?
>something like the entire world's electricity consumption for a billion years
What was the entire world's electricity consumption 500 years ago?
Are you? Removing from the moon a cubic kilometre of solid rock per person would be a thing you'd notice in a side-by-side comparison, while being less than the optical illusion that makes it seem bigger when close to the horizon.
30 miles down is 2-3 times the Mohorovicic discontinuity between crust and mantle; 30 miles up you're above the ozone layer and the air is too thin to breathe. That's the quantity being discussed.
> >- if humans remove material from the Moon, the rest of it doesn't "float off into the universe", it just stays in orbit unless it is actively pushed, which would take an insane amount of energy
> That's the point... what exactly do you think is going to happen to earth in that scenario?
It stays right where it is: orbiting earth.
> >something like the entire world's electricity consumption for a billion years
> What was the entire world's electricity consumption 500 years ago?
Electricity is a red herring; consider all power of all kinds combined. 500 years ago, let's assume that meant just human muscles even though windmills and watermills existed and animal muscle was also used, just to maximise the difference.
The estimated world population in 1500 was around 0.43-0.50 billion; again, let's low-ball that to 430 million.
Human calorie use is about 2500/day; multiply by 430 million gets us 52.06 GW.
Today, we are at 20 TW, which is a factor of 384.17 greater.
Things which are actually likely to get us the kind of increases to our available power such that we might do this include "build a Dyson swarm", which I wouldn't rule out happening in my lifetime, but also doing that means we can do a thing called "star lifting", and we'd want to because the sun contains more interesting elements than all the planets combined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_lifting
>30 miles down is 2-3 times the Mohorovicic discontinuity between crust and mantle; 30 miles up you're above the ozone layer and the air is too thin to breathe. That's the quantity being discussed.
Again, I'm aware of how large the moon is.
>It stays right where it is: orbiting earth.
Huh? You just asked if I understood how large the moon was, and then came to the conclusion the only thing that would happen should the moon not be there is that it would stay where it is? It would completely change the tilt of the earth, tides, etc. Do you think the spreading cloud of moon dust would have the same gravitational pull as the moon in one piece?
>Electricity is a red herring; consider all power of all kinds combined. 500 years ago, let's assume that meant just human muscles even though windmills and watermills existed and animal muscle was also used, just to maximise the difference.
It's very much not a red herring, and you can't have it both ways. If you're basing it on "human power" then you're going to need to calculate today's human power as well because there are endless manual labor jobs that humans still persist at today.
Except power hasn't increased linearly over time, which I assume you know and at this point are just arguing for the sake of argument.
In 1900 the total yearly power consumption of humanity was 12TW. In 2022 it was 178,899TW, an increase of 14,908x in 100 years. Assuming a 384.17 increase is a great way to make some very flawed assumptions look good. But it doesn't reflect reality.
> Huh? You just asked if I understood how large the moon was, and then came to the conclusion the only thing that would happen should the moon not be there is that it would stay where it is? It would completely change the tilt of the earth, tides, etc. Do you think the spreading cloud of moon dust would have the same gravitational pull as the moon in one piece?
You appear to be mixing different things.
You wrote this:
> Have you stopped to think what happens to the earth if the moon were just outright gone? Because that's ultimately what the debate is about. If anything valuable is found there, you can be assured someone will strip mine it until every last piece of value is removed, and the non-valuable thing is left to float off into the universe, not their problem.
Specifically focus on this bit: "the non-valuable thing is left to float off into the universe".
No: it stays in orbit of the Earth. If it's not valuable, nobody's going to move it.
> It's very much not a red herring, and you can't have it both ways. If you're basing it on "human power" then you're going to need to calculate today's human power as well because there are endless manual labor jobs that humans still persist at today.
Human muscle used to be relevant. And I gave that alone for 500 years ago in order to maximise the difference between then and now, to steel-man my case.
> Except power hasn't increased linearly over time, which I assume you know and at this point are just arguing for the sake of argument.
I see you don't know what "linear" means.
If I'd assumed linear growth from 50 GW to 20 TW (which is 20,000 GW) over the last 500 years, thats (20,000 - 50) GW/500 years, which is an insignificant difference from saying 20TW/500 years. Applying that forward would for another 500 years would look like "double", not "x384".
I am in fact assuming exponential growth by suggesting a further x384 growth in the next 500 years.
The exponent itself has to increase in order to get faster than this rate.
> In 1900 the total yearly power consumption of humanity was 12TW. In 2022 it was 178,899TW, an increase of 14,908x in 100 years. Assuming a 384.17 increase is a great way to make some very flawed assumptions look good. But it doesn't reflect reality.
I see you can't read the graph.
That graph says it was 12,131 TWh/year in 1900 (which is 1.385 terawatts), and 178,899 TWh/year in 2022 (which is 20.42 terawatts). This is a change of x14.75.
You might have had a hint that your claim of x14,908 growth over this period was implausible just by noticing that your monitor was less than 14,908 pixels tall and the height for the chart at 1900 was more than 1 pixel tall.
You might have also noticed that it was incompatible with your other (also false) claim that "human power" is a significant fraction of current total power use, given that the human population hasn't grown 15,000 times larger over the last 500 years, which it would have needed to for both the claim "human power is a relevant fraction today" and "x14908 growth since then" to be simultaneously true.
If we were actually using 178,899 TW (not TWh/year which is what the graph you linked to is saying), the planet earth would not be a "pale blue dot" when seen from space, because we would have had to cover 80%-103% of the planet (including oceans and clouds, not just deserts and cities and forests) in something that absorbed all incoming sunlight.
Greatly changing the mass of the moon seems like a bad idea, in general. Obviously it would take a lot of time and effort to change the mass in any significant way, but by the time we noticed any problems we caused it would be too late.
"If someone can cut down the entire Amazon Rainforest, I say let them. What a fantastical technical achievement."
Whether you're trolling or not, what a horrible take unless you're hoping the human race just wipes itself out. With our current rate of technological progress, someone having the ability to mine the moon to nothing is at most 500 years away, maybe sooner if they find something under the surface that makes it financially attractive.
Removing significant percentages of the Moon's mass is a whole different ballgame from climate change on Earth, where even now people will debate if it'sreally anthropogenic.
There would be an immediately noticeable harm with the genuine ability to make Earth entirely uninhabitable, and unlike with climate change, where the mechanisms at work aren't directly relatable, with an orbit change, the mechanisms are pretty relatable to everyone, in the form of seasons and their total disruption.
As such, I don't think the typical ideas of people ignoring the problem in favor of keeping the money flowing apply, as those are all cases where the harm is some unclear time in the future involving the suffering of people who are not the decision makers.
>There would be an immediately noticeable harm with the genuine ability to make Earth entirely uninhabitable, and unlike with climate change, where the mechanisms at work aren't directly relatable, with an orbit change, the mechanisms are pretty relatable to everyone, in the form of seasons and their total disruption.
There is immediate noticeable harm to oil spills, and yet you still have people arguing that we should run pipelines next to rivers because it's easier and cheaper. I think you grossly overestimate some folks ability to have a rational discussion when they've got a financial incentive not to.
I think you're misunderstanding what I mean by immediate noticeable harm. Running pipelines next to rivers has the potential to cause an oil spill, so the harm is not immediate. There's still room for people to convince themselves that they'll make the pipeline safe and reliable. But the mass of the Moon is so high, that mining and shipping off significant portions of it has to be very deliberate and there's no question of 'potential' in causing a shift in the Earth's orbit.
For context, at the rate at which we mine metals on Earth, it'd take tens to hundreds of millions of years to mine even 0.1% of the Moon, and that's without considering that all that mass would have to be transported elsewhere for it to be a problem (and since other destinations, mostly by definition, have their own easier to access resources, that seems unnecessary). Mining all that material on human timescales would be a very deliberate operation dwarfing all human mining from the start of civilization.
There's an unshielded nuclear reactor hanging in the sky just like bricks don't.
I'm not a nuclear physicist so I may be orders of magnitude off, but my gut feeling is that being constantly bombarded with the solar wind might be putting into a very slightly radioactive equilibrium? (I'm thinking more along the lines of the story of the radioactive boy scout, not Trinitite, and I don't know how radioactive "normal" steel is compared to "low-background").
I understand: "Those people have valid reasons to tell people what not to do on the Moon, but I find it crazy that they could think there are valid reasons to tell people what not to do on the Moon".
Serious question: What is the difference between telling people what they can and can't do on the moon vs telling people what they can and can't do on vacant land here on earth? If I go out to some remote area in the United States and start building houses, I'll almost certainly get into legal trouble, especially if I don't have any permits and definitely if I don't own the land.
Who gets to own the moon? Is it just whoever has the resources to travel there and build stuff? Imagine if Space X decides to carve a portrait of Elon Musk into the face of the moon at a scale large enough it can be seen from the naked eye on earth. Would that be OK just because he had the money to do it?
Probably because the moon doesn't have property lines and nation-state borders (For now). Vacant lots down here on earth are usually privately owned or by local or national governments.
The Age of Exploration has ended so long ago that we have all collectively forgotten how it works. Almost every square meter of land on Earth is covered by one group or another of People with Guns. The only ones that aren't are ones so deeply undesirable that nobody cares.
But it actually works in a fairly intuitive manner. People who get to the Moon can do as they like there. Anyone who wants to stop them is invited to go to the Moon and try. This does not mean immediately by shooting them. Talking is a classic option for many good reasons that won't be going anywhere. But if you can't get there at all, you have no stake. If you can't get to the moon, you will have no say.
On Earth it is easy to forget that enforcement of laws requires enforcers to be able to get to the location where it will be enforced, because humanity conquered the task of getting from anywhere people are to anywhere people are at a reasonable speed a while ago. But this is still a base requirement. It hasn't gone anywhere. It has just been a long time since it was in question and people forget about it.
Space exploration will modify this for some period of time because in the Age of Exploration, people could live on the land. While people living in space require an Earth footprint to maintain themselves, that will give people on Earth a mechanism for enforcing power over the moon based on that footprint. But science fiction is full unto overflowing of space colonies going to war with Earth once they are capable of being independent for a reason; it's not so much a "trope" as a plainly obvious consequence of independence. Better treatments observe that Earth will know this and take it into account as it tries to hamstring its colonies from being independent, but A: this will eventually take the form of overtly hostile acts if space colonization continues on that will provide abundant casus belli for the colonies and B: there's a huge economic incentive to make them as independent as possible because it will always be more expensive to supply space colonies from Earth than to supply them from space resources.
Getting back to the original question, what will happen is this: Anyone who can get to the moon and stay there will have a say. Anyone who can't won't. Wringing hands, abtruse philosophical arguments, having hissy fits, screaming really loudly about "rights", complaining, none of it will matter. "Power comes from the barrel of a gun" is actually downstream of "power comes from being there". If you can't be there, you will have no power.
Also, I'm not particularly celebrating or condemning this in this post. This is just how it is.
That unavoidable independence that comes with long-term human settlements (especially in places further than the Moon) is interesting to me, if only because historically interesting things happen when significant numbers of people establish a system outside of currently established systems, something that’s not been practically possible on Earth for quite some time.
Presumably those who get to own the Moon will have people here on Earth who they love or care about. Following the "this is just how it is" logic, what's stopping a barrel of gun from being pointed at those people?
That doesn't come up until space is truly independent of Earth, resource wise.
That will be long enough that by the time it happens, they may not have any connections to Earth.
Plus, back on Earth, you have all the normal limitations of the gun barrel. If Nigeria doesn't like what Brazil is doing in space, Nigeria is still going to find it challenging to threaten the Brazilians doing space work with guns.
And to the point being made here, protesters protesting out in front of SpaceX are going to find it challenging to successfully deploy gun-power against them, because the local dominant People with Guns take a very dim view of violating their monopoly... and, likely, SpaceX (here really just any space company) is already acting with their approval.
The net of the complicated web of People with Guns here on Earth still pretty much boils down to the situation I described. Space exploration isn't going to be done by voting or polling, and the Veto of the Merely Loud (among the other vetos) that is so easy on Earth is going to prove quite difficult to project into space. In space, nobody can read your Earth protest sign.
I won't say there's never been a country that has fought for independence while simultaneously needing global trade for 100% of their food and water[0], but there definitely hasn't been a case of a country needing global trade for the literal oxygen they breathe.
Two moons colonies, one that has farms and one that doesn't, I would expect to have very different prospects.
[0] Though I've never heard of such a case, my history isn't good enough to make that claim. And no, mere famine isn't a strong enough example for this, those can be monstrously catastrophic without being existential.
Yes, a space colony would be very unlikely to ever be "fully" independent of Earth. Why would they cut off trade? Surely cutting off relations to Earth would always come with some price.
But, there's prices, and there's prices. Earth history can tell you all about that.
I mean, we're witnessing how this is a continuum and not a binary thing right now, as East and West are decoupling. Will they decouple fully? Doubt it. Will they perhaps recouple someday? Perhaps. Is there a price to this decoupling? Yes, on both sides, but apparently the sides consider it worth it, because it's happening.
Eventually lunar entities might decide they don’t want to just offshore all resources to subsidize earth based companies, and seek or fight for independence from their colonial overlord on earth. There’s plenty of precedent for that on earth, even in the modern era.
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first to the moon and they planted the US flag on it in 1969, so that technically made it US territory. But then when they took off in the lander, the blast blew the flag over. I don't know if that affected the legal status or not.
Laws only matter within a state. In the international realm, there is no common judge and no binding law. Nations exist in a state of nature.
In other words, ownership of the moon won't be determined by technical legal questions about Armstrong's flag, but rather by a stick-measuring contest among the interested nations.
Ha, there was a treaty signed in 1967 or thereabout that made the moon property of "mankind" and that every nation has equal access to it. Now, if anything of value is found there I'm guessing this treaty is dropped immediately.
It’s not really a libertarian thing. Society has to balance more than just the wants or concerns of scientists and they have no more right than anyone else to dictate what we do with the moon.
Its a joke. It sounds like a normal libertarian argument, but on the moon. If you want a more serious answer though, we have multiple treaties and moratoriums on what is, and is not allowed in space and on the moon. They were agreed upon because we have mutual interests, and want to preserve humanities future of spaceflight and research.
Are these treaties binding? I know there can be other repercussions for signatories for violating treaties. But usually there are no clear rules on what the repercussions should be. Also , since signatories are nation-states, not sure how individuals could be held accountable for any violations by the international community. Such as private corporations
These kinds of threads are entertaining to me, to see how various strands of libertarian/techno-capitalist are confronted with explaining how apparently-immutable-and-eternal property rights originate. The ones where they basically admit it comes down to "who has the most guns" are the best.
You mean the arrogant billionaires that think they can buy everything and anything and mostly ruin them?
Cause these are the only ones that have expressed interest, instead of, you know, contributing to more menial tasks like food/water shortage, environmental protection etc.
So many commenters seem to be missing the point of this article. None of this is about "preserving the environment". Its about how to allocate the moon's scarce natural resources, such as sites with cold temperatures necessary for astronomy, areas with no radio interference for radio astronomy, and mining sites rich in natural resources such as helium-3. Some of these sites overlap with each other and would require coordination to ensure usage for one purpose doesn't interfere with other possible uses for the same site. These are valid concerns definitely worth thinking about now.
Instead of "scientists are calling for the moon to be better protected from development," it could have been titled: "scientists say they deserve first dibs on developing the lunar surface."
I understand study of the early universe has potentially important ramifications in physics - but scanning exoplanets for evidence of life seems pointless to me. Say we found life within 10 LY of our solar system. What would we even do with this information?
10LY is close enough that given a sufficiently motivating factor, like strong evidence of life, we could build machines to study them in more detail. There are concepts for telescopes which are technically feasible with current or near future technology, albeit very expensive and long travel times, that could take much more detailed images of the planet, eg a solar gravitational lensing telescope.
Hell, 10ly is close enough to feasibly do a probe flyby in a hundred years or so if we put more attention on refining relevant technologies like solar sails and nuclear propulsion.
Also, the detection of life that close would have important implications for things like the fermi paradox. If we find any life within 10ly, it becomes more likely that the universe is absolutely teeming with life.
But if that's the case, why isn't it absolutely teeming with intelligent life as well? Even at our relatively basic space travel capabilities, we can see that traveling between stars, or even just communicating between stars is not technically infeasible, especially for machines.
I'm not so sure that it's been proven these distances are navigable on human timescales. I know solar sails have been theorized, but aren't we very far from seeing that kind of technology as a reality? Say we spend ~100 years going to a planet to collect data. What then? What do we do with that data? If the universe is teeming with intelligent life - it would have to be very VERY local in our galaxy to make any kind of difference to us at all (and I still can't think of one).
Not meaning to get downvoted here - I'm just genuinely curious what people think the real scientific value is here.
To be clear, by "in a hundred years" I don't mean that with current technology it'd take the sail a hundred years to get there, I mean that by improving the tech for a hundred years with an extrasolar destination in mind, we'd be able to send a probe that arrives there on human timescales. Currently there have only been low-orbit tests of solar sails, they need much more development to go interstellar, but not so much that it's completely infeasible to achieve in the near-ish future. Since we don't have much reason to want a closeup of planets in other star systems yet, we don't really put much effort into the associated propulsion technologies. But the detection of nearby life would change that by giving us a destination, similar to how the Moon and Mars give us a sort of 'ladder' of destinations for directing our development of space technology.
Say we find that single-celled life is very common, then, considering our lack of detection of multi-cellular life, we'd have reason to put more effort into understanding the conditions which led to the emergence of multicellular life on Earth, since by the only statistics we would have, that must be a significant filter on the development of life. By having data on the environment they evolved in, we could understand our own evolution (eg if that planet is much younger than Earth, it could serve as a picture of what early Earth might have been like, if it's similarly old, we could try to understand what went differently on Earth). We could also figure out if they might be based on similar chemistry etc, all of which would feed into our understanding of the origins of life on Earth.
Detecting intelligent life would have a different, more 'philosophical' effect, even if we couldn't interact with them. The galaxy is theoretically colonizable over millions of years. The technology to do so is probably only thousands of years away for us. But, since the galaxy has existed for billions of years, and has been hospitable to life for at least 4 billion years, it is unreasonable to assume that much of that intelligent life won't have been around for millions of years longer than ourselves. In which case, why aren't they already everywhere? It'd have to be some sort of nearly fundamental limitation all intelligent life runs into, in which case it'd also affect what we as a species can aspire to achieve. The more intelligent life we find, the more unsurmountable the limitation becomes.
Until then I'm just another stupid scientist. But I'm aware that other people have different interests. I think the people who are calling for areas to be preserved are aware too, which is why they are trying to start a dialogue.
>I want to study X and to do that I need Y. And you're going to give it to me because it might help our scientific understanding. Probably. Maybe.
Science overall is useful, but whether any individual part of it is useful is a lot more questionable. What gets studied is about what a (willful) scientist wants to study.
I suspect that people setting up something economically useful on the moon would actually end up being more valuable for science. It would mean that there will be economical access to the moon. If it's government-funded and science-led, then the whole thing might end on some political whim.
It's especially disheartening to see my own community come off this way.
That said, I think most of us are aware of the reality: from a funding point of view science is somewhere between a luxury and a trick to teach young idealistic people skills. Those skills can then be repurposed for industry or military applications. We aren't at all shy about pointing this out in grant proposals, so it's sad that people come off as though the scientific community is somehow entitled to anything.
Don't get me wrong, I fully believe that science is important, but in a world ruled by markets science funding is always going to be a charity.
This dialogue from Smithsonian Magazine seems somewhat confused. Protecting the moon from development is a valid position to take; and somehow, to the contrary, the article promotes various scientific development projects. It's disingenuous to advocate for position A while calling it position ¬A.
I personally don't much care what we develop on the moon. It's a rock.
I'm more concerned with Mars. Mars potentially had life, once. There's even a vague chance that it might still, somehow. Evidence for either would be extremely precarious. Unlike the Moon, every bit of waste vented into the atmosphere is going to be carried around the entire planet by the wind, tainting everything.
If it were up to me, I'd declare a moratorium on humans being on Mars. Not permanent, but, say, 100 years. Enough time for us to send lots of robots to explore the planet without mixing our biology up in it.
Build up whatever automated support is needed for that. It's industrial and ugly, and surely dumping out its own non-biological pollution, but that doesn't risk breeding the way the way our microorganisms do. And everywhere we go, we spread microorganisms, lots of them. (In theory they'd be contained, but accidents happen.)
I'd settle for 50 years. Or even 20 years past the point where we'd be capable of the kind of rockets required to build an industrial infrastructure. Just gather a crapload of data from the planet as pristinely as we can, just because we're never going to get another opportunity. Use that time to build whatever you want on the Moon.
Of course it's not up to me. There will surely be astronauts on Mars well before I think it's a good idea. It will certainly be exciting and produce a lot of great data fast. I'll just cross my fingers that they can get it while it's still there to get, before every test turns up "We found DNA on Mars... oops, it's us again."
I would argue that there is very little value to us of a few bacterial cells who might exist down some cracks on mars.
There will never be a time we have fully searched for life there, and even if there was something there to find, I think we could probably identify it even with contamination from us.
The existence of a second kind of life somewhere in the universe would be extraordinary. It would double the number of life-creating events we'd be aware of. It would take the number of off-earth origins of life from 0 to 1.
To the degree that it's different from ours, it would vastly expand the scope of what we understand "life" could be. Or to the degree that it's similar, that would tighten the boundaries a bit. Even if it turns out to be just meteorite-driven contamination from earth, it would be hugely informative to know it could work.
Of course there's no need for us to look forever. A century would more than do it. Even a decade of really concerted effort would be hugely informative; we'd either find it or not.
Not to mention that periodic mass transfers between planets have already contaminated it; the OP is mistaken that Mars is somehow a pristine environment.
I thought this was completely crazy. There are no ecosystems to protect, no endangered species, no green living things. Moving development from Earth into space should count as an overwhelming win for the environment.